The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 5, 1988 — A wild mixture of gangster thriller, slapstick comedy, and bittersweet romance, François Truffaut’s second film was one of the signal works of the French New Wave.
Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...
Essays
Jul 11, 1988 — Cinema has given us any number of tales of the criminal underworld, and explorations of the mindsets of murderers—yet there’s been nothing quite like Shohei Imamura’s searing work.
Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...
On the Channel
Nov 18, 2025 — This December, make yourself at home in some of cinema’s most memorable hotels, celebrate Julianne Moore’s bracingly human performances, or explore the trailblazing debuts of Black women filmmakers.
Features
Jun 25, 2024 — A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.
May 20, 2024 — From documentaries and stop-motion animation to multimedia projects, the richly varied work of this veteran director is a testament to her innovative spirit and her commitment to the everyday beauty of African American experiences.
Nov 2, 2021 — Federico Fellini’s earliest masterpiece is a story of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, that occasioned the director’s ascent to stardom.
The Daily
Apr 6, 2021 — The new issue spotlights some of the most notable films from this year’s Berlinale—and more.
Essays
Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...